10 Doctor Who Deleted Scenes That Should Have Been Left In
6. Tenth Planet Reconstruction (Twice Upon A Time)
Twice Upon a Time is another one of those episodes that was notoriously over-length. Reportedly, the first edit ran for 90 minutes.
“It was longer than Dunkirk,” Steven Moffat recalled in one interview. “And I mean the historical event, not the movie!”
Most of this missing material is yet to surface, though some of it was reinstated in Paul Cornell’s 2018 novelisation of the story. Furthermore, the story’s director Rachel Talalay has since reassured fans that nothing major was lost.
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There’s one case where we’d beg to differ, however.
The episode opens with a thrilling recap of the First Doctor's final story The Tenth Planet, combining archive footage and newly-shot material. As broadcast, this sequence features a mere handful of new shots, but as the accompanying episode of Doctor Who Extra revealed, much more of the story was reenacted than what we saw onscreen.
Most tantalisingly of all, the revamped Mondasian Cybermen costumes from World Enough And Time/The Doctor Falls were pressed back into service, allowing the team to restage some of The Tenth Planet's action pieces on a 21st century budget.
Sure, the montage as it stands is tighter, and gets to the action quicker. But would it really have hurt to include just a few more seconds of the reshot Tenth Planet? It would have made many a fan’s Christmas!